17 ms·

Even if YouTube could afford to do this, nobody else could, which would lock us into an EU-sanctioned YouTube monopoly...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jerf 8y ago
Market leaders are generally in favor of regulation, for that exact reason. Sometimes they'll play the protest game in public, but privately they are happy to see regulation. If YouTube is actually lobbying against this both in public and in private, then I would personally consider that extremely strong evidence this is really bad. However, I have no inside info on their private position.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Well, they can be, but what if the regulations substantially shrink the market as a whole? May be more profitable to have 30% of a large market than 90% of a small one.
  - alex_c 8y ago
    A lot of tech industries seem to be winner-take-all, so aiming for 30% might not be a sustainable plan in many cases.
    - AJ007 8y ago
      Well at least that’s what companies that are losing lots of money like to tell their investors. I’ve heard it many times and can’t think of any definite examples.
    - bduerst 8y ago
      Not really. Vimeo shows that you can corner niche markets successfully. Profitability and growth aren't dependent on market dominance, even in tech.
      - trjordan 8y ago
        YouTube Vimeo is more like 1% / 99%. By almost anybody's definition, that's winner take all. Vimeo aims for $100mil this year: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iacs-vimeo-aims-for-100-million-in-revenue-this-year-ceo-idUSKCN1G71PN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iac... YouTube Could be a $15 billion business this year: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/18/youtube-could-be-a-15-billion-business-this-year.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/18/youtube-could-be-a...
        bduerst 8y ago
        Again, success isn't measured by marketshare, but profitability and growth. Vimeo has 15% of the embedded market by domain, and has managed to be profitable. Even in your article it talks about how Youtube isn't exactly profitable, and is dragging down Google's average CPC for the business.
        mcv 8y ago
        A massive difference indeed, but by any other standard, $100 million is not bad at all.
        AJ007 8y ago
        This isn't a good comparison. Netflix, Twitch, Snapchat, Facebook/Instagram are.
  - castlecrasher2 8y ago
    If YouTube can afford it but their competitors go out of business in the EU how would the market shrink? Regulations tend to shrink only the providers, not the consumers.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > If YouTube can afford it but their competitors go out of business in the EU how would the market shrink? "The market" is a statement about demand, not supply. The market can still shrink if the legislation goes through, because the legislation can have secondary effects that cause people to be less interested in consuming content on a tube-style platform.
    - TulliusCicero 8y ago
      Youtube isn't really providing a necessity, it's providing an entertainment option. Consumers have lots of those. If it becomes very onerous or expensive to provide their content, then they (and other providers) may have to produce less of it, which would shrink the market.
      - freeone3000 8y ago
        Youtube doesn't create video content. Youtube is a video content reseller - and if it can't afford to buy people's video content, it's unlikely anyone else can. You're shrinking the size of the video provider market!
        DoctorOetker 8y ago
        perhaps it is the common goal? less societal criticism/feedback, more top down determination of media?
        thatguy0900 8y ago
        I think most political commentators on YouTube that do it for money use patreon more than YouTube ads, many political subjects are demonetized automatically now. YouTube doesn't want to buy their content much regardless of if its able.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > May be more profitable to have 30% of a large market than 90% of a small one. Or in this case, 80% of a large market more than 100% of a small one.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > If YouTube is actually lobbying against this both in public and in private, then I would personally consider that extremely strong evidence this is really bad. However, I have no inside info on their private position. If the proposed law actually is too expensive for them, I could see them attempting to weaken it to a sweet spot where it's affordable for them, but expensive enough to still keep others out of the market.
tkcins 8y ago
Video hosting sites lose money, so it's not like a contender will ever appear, unless the EU pours a ton of money into it, and not even then (just imagine how many EU funds Dailymotion has probably taken)
- Arnt 8y ago
  How do you know that Youtube loses money? (Curious. Really.)
  - pickdenis 8y ago
    They don't say so but people have calculated estimates and it seems there's hardly any way youtube could be _making_ money. Just google it, there's tons of articles with interesting speculations.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ArchTypical 8y ago
      The advertising budgets spent on DFP (now the overwhelming majority of budgets) makes it obvious. Youtube makes money. It prints money by information trading on top of that. Subscriptions on top of that. Google covers costs. Maybe not all that money comes back to Youtube as a department, but published revenue numbers are a game for an organization of that size. A guaranteed adserv on every CDN delivery (and again over a certain number of minutes) is more than the content and serve cost. CPMs for video are net 3$, at least. I don't know who's doing the math, but a link would be interesting with someone demonstrating how they are upside down.
      - menzoic 8y ago
        Not to mention they own their infrastructure.
      - londons_explore 8y ago
        Youtubes infrastructure costs are massive - well into the $1B+ per year category. Netflix might serve more gigabytes to users, but netflix's content library is tiny in comparison, so edge caches have a near 100% hit rate keeping infrastructure costs a fraction of youtube's costs.
eli 8y ago
I think you could make a pretty strong case that Google AdWords are even further entrenched and harder to compete with thanks to GDPR.
- manigandham 8y ago
  That's definitely the case, and the entire adtech community knows it. GDPR is another example of lawmakers having no insight or cooperation with the industry they're regulating and creating unintended consequences.
  - downandout 8y ago
    I wouldn’t say that the consequences were unintended. Lawmakers aren’t that dumb. More likely, they engineered the legislation specifically to consolidate market power and revenue in the hands of a small group of entities. They did this both because a small group is more easily controlled, and because this creates incredibly deep pockets from which they can suck out massive, headline grabbing fines. These fines serve to enrich the European governments that assess them, and help the politicians behind GDPR appear to be champions of the people who are taking money from evil capitalist American corporations.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      What are these companies going to be fined for when they are following the very laws that now protect them via user-given consent and further establishing their monopolies? If anything, these companies probably welcomed these regulations and now have more power over politicians who have used up much political capital in getting this done. It's unlikely that any corrective actions will be taken anytime soon.
      - downandout 8y ago
        What are these companies going to be fined for when they are following the very laws that now protect them via user-given consent and further establishing their monopolies? Oh, they'll find things. There are already active formal investigations by GDPR authorities in various countries against Twitter, Facebook, and Google. The companies do like GDPR, as the fines will be nothing more than a small tax on their massive revenue. It's a win for both the companies and the politicians: the companies get a monopoly in exchange for a small tax in the form of fines, revenue hungry EU nations get multi-billion dollar windfalls, and EU politicians get to look like defenders of the people who will be tough on US companies. Everybody wins, except for would-be competitors and the consumers that don't get any choices about the services they use.
Raphmedia 8y ago
Or nobody online is ever able to do this, online video streaming dies and TV keeps on living on artificial life support.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I'm wondering if this is overblown, in that while it is clear that rights clearance is an issue the technical solution is essentially moderating all posts. And while that probably breaks the current YouTube business model, as I understand it from Alphabet's quarterly statements YouTube isn't even breaking even today. I get that it would massively reduce the 'new content stream' but for their commercial clients things wouldn't change all that much. It would also eliminate unlawful video completely since everything would be pre-screened.
- missjellyfish 8y ago
  That reminds me of Orwell.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    How so? That content is screened for copyright infringement?
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
What are they supposed to be affording that's actually required in the Directive, like explicitly. Does it say "content must be scanned" or is it more "carriers must ensure content is licensed". If it's the later what's to stop them just adding a "is this licensed" tick box [aka check-box] to the upload form; which IIRC YouTube already have? They, YouTube, keep mentioning science videos and such but I can't work out what they mean, why would that be any more blocked than cat videos, or videos of people falling over, or whatever else YouTube is hosting -- is quality content somehow more at risk or is that just YouTube's attempt to spin/market their opposition?
- kllrnohj 8y ago
  The issue is that YouTube, or any other video host, becomes liable for copyright violations of their users. They lose the safe harbor of just being a middle man and must actively prevent unlicensed redistributions. This means you not only need a ContentID system in the first place, you also need to be ready to handle the financial & legal consequences of inevitably not being perfect.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Ah OK, it was written as if it was a primarily technological cost to perform the "filtering" that was prohibitive. They mean then they can't afford the system if their anticipated penalties are imposed && if they fail to catch unlicensed works && are subsequently sued successfully for large amounts && can't recover those costs from the uploader. How many microseconds would it be after such a regulation passed that media mega corps would pull the trigger and kill the goose-that-laid-the-golden-eggs. >you not only need a ContentID system // How does the Directive specify that, I'm afraid I haven't read it yet.
    - bskap 8y ago
      > In the absence of the authorisation referred to in the second subparagraph of paragraph 1, Member States shall provide that an online content sharing service provider shall not be liable for acts of communication to the public or making available to the public within the meaning of this Article when: > (a) it demonstrates that it has made best efforts to prevent the availability of specific works or other subject matter by implementing effective and proportionate measures, in accordance with paragraph 5, to prevent the availability on its services of the specific works or other subject matter identified by rightholders and for which the rightholders have provided the service with relevant and necessary information for the application of these measures; So basically if the rightsholders can convince the courts that they could have done more to proactively prevent copyright infringement, they're liable.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
A monopoly is what we have right now.
surak 8y ago
That IPR is an interesting blockchain/DLT use case is well known, what is perhaps not that well known is that Google does not like permissionless blockchain solutions as it would disrupt their conceptually centralized platform model. A few years ago there was a start-up planning such a solution for handling IPR related to music, but the copyrights holders or rather their national governance agencies did not want to enlist their IPR through this system, possibly because a transparent automatic system would have replaced these governing bodies and their armies of lawyers. Hopefully the @European Commission will fund a standardization effort regarding IPR and a permissionless blockchain solution to solve the issue described in the article. The worst case scenario is that Google pushes its own ContentID solution on everyone and charges a percentage to perform the billing. This is a much larger issue than what is presented by the CEO.
dools 8y ago
No, any regulated financial impact occurs across the board and is not anti-competitive. Regulation is good, lobbying is bad, libertarianism will destroy us all.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jerf 8y ago

Market leaders are generally in favor of regulation, for that exact reason. Sometimes they'll play the protest game in public, but privately they are happy to see regulation. If YouTube is actually lobbying against this both in public and in private, then I would personally consider that extremely strong evidence this is really bad. However, I have no inside info on their private position.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
Well, they can be, but what if the regulations substantially shrink the market as a whole? May be more profitable to have 30% of a large market than 90% of a small one.
- alex_c 8y ago
  A lot of tech industries seem to be winner-take-all, so aiming for 30% might not be a sustainable plan in many cases.
  - AJ007 8y ago
    Well at least that’s what companies that are losing lots of money like to tell their investors. I’ve heard it many times and can’t think of any definite examples.
  - bduerst 8y ago
    Not really. Vimeo shows that you can corner niche markets successfully. Profitability and growth aren't dependent on market dominance, even in tech.
    - trjordan 8y ago
      YouTube Vimeo is more like 1% / 99%. By almost anybody's definition, that's winner take all. Vimeo aims for $100mil this year: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iacs-vimeo-aims-for-100-million-in-revenue-this-year-ceo-idUSKCN1G71PN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iac... YouTube Could be a $15 billion business this year: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/18/youtube-could-be-a-15-billion-business-this-year.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/18/youtube-could-be-a...
      - bduerst 8y ago
        Again, success isn't measured by marketshare, but profitability and growth. Vimeo has 15% of the embedded market by domain, and has managed to be profitable. Even in your article it talks about how Youtube isn't exactly profitable, and is dragging down Google's average CPC for the business.
      - mcv 8y ago
        A massive difference indeed, but by any other standard, $100 million is not bad at all.
      - AJ007 8y ago
        This isn't a good comparison. Netflix, Twitch, Snapchat, Facebook/Instagram are.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  If YouTube can afford it but their competitors go out of business in the EU how would the market shrink? Regulations tend to shrink only the providers, not the consumers.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > If YouTube can afford it but their competitors go out of business in the EU how would the market shrink? "The market" is a statement about demand, not supply. The market can still shrink if the legislation goes through, because the legislation can have secondary effects that cause people to be less interested in consuming content on a tube-style platform.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    Youtube isn't really providing a necessity, it's providing an entertainment option. Consumers have lots of those. If it becomes very onerous or expensive to provide their content, then they (and other providers) may have to produce less of it, which would shrink the market.
    - freeone3000 8y ago
      Youtube doesn't create video content. Youtube is a video content reseller - and if it can't afford to buy people's video content, it's unlikely anyone else can. You're shrinking the size of the video provider market!
      - DoctorOetker 8y ago
        perhaps it is the common goal? less societal criticism/feedback, more top down determination of media?
        thatguy0900 8y ago
        I think most political commentators on YouTube that do it for money use patreon more than YouTube ads, many political subjects are demonetized automatically now. YouTube doesn't want to buy their content much regardless of if its able.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > May be more profitable to have 30% of a large market than 90% of a small one. Or in this case, 80% of a large market more than 100% of a small one.
mcphage 8y ago
> If YouTube is actually lobbying against this both in public and in private, then I would personally consider that extremely strong evidence this is really bad. However, I have no inside info on their private position. If the proposed law actually is too expensive for them, I could see them attempting to weaken it to a sweet spot where it's affordable for them, but expensive enough to still keep others out of the market.

tkcins 8y ago

Video hosting sites lose money, so it's not like a contender will ever appear, unless the EU pours a ton of money into it, and not even then (just imagine how many EU funds Dailymotion has probably taken)

Arnt 8y ago
How do you know that Youtube loses money? (Curious. Really.)
- pickdenis 8y ago
  They don't say so but people have calculated estimates and it seems there's hardly any way youtube could be _making_ money. Just google it, there's tons of articles with interesting speculations.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ArchTypical 8y ago
    The advertising budgets spent on DFP (now the overwhelming majority of budgets) makes it obvious. Youtube makes money. It prints money by information trading on top of that. Subscriptions on top of that. Google covers costs. Maybe not all that money comes back to Youtube as a department, but published revenue numbers are a game for an organization of that size. A guaranteed adserv on every CDN delivery (and again over a certain number of minutes) is more than the content and serve cost. CPMs for video are net 3$, at least. I don't know who's doing the math, but a link would be interesting with someone demonstrating how they are upside down.
    - menzoic 8y ago
      Not to mention they own their infrastructure.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      Youtubes infrastructure costs are massive - well into the $1B+ per year category. Netflix might serve more gigabytes to users, but netflix's content library is tiny in comparison, so edge caches have a near 100% hit rate keeping infrastructure costs a fraction of youtube's costs.

eli 8y ago

I think you could make a pretty strong case that Google AdWords are even further entrenched and harder to compete with thanks to GDPR.

manigandham 8y ago
That's definitely the case, and the entire adtech community knows it. GDPR is another example of lawmakers having no insight or cooperation with the industry they're regulating and creating unintended consequences.
- downandout 8y ago
  I wouldn’t say that the consequences were unintended. Lawmakers aren’t that dumb. More likely, they engineered the legislation specifically to consolidate market power and revenue in the hands of a small group of entities. They did this both because a small group is more easily controlled, and because this creates incredibly deep pockets from which they can suck out massive, headline grabbing fines. These fines serve to enrich the European governments that assess them, and help the politicians behind GDPR appear to be champions of the people who are taking money from evil capitalist American corporations.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    What are these companies going to be fined for when they are following the very laws that now protect them via user-given consent and further establishing their monopolies? If anything, these companies probably welcomed these regulations and now have more power over politicians who have used up much political capital in getting this done. It's unlikely that any corrective actions will be taken anytime soon.
    - downandout 8y ago
      What are these companies going to be fined for when they are following the very laws that now protect them via user-given consent and further establishing their monopolies? Oh, they'll find things. There are already active formal investigations by GDPR authorities in various countries against Twitter, Facebook, and Google. The companies do like GDPR, as the fines will be nothing more than a small tax on their massive revenue. It's a win for both the companies and the politicians: the companies get a monopoly in exchange for a small tax in the form of fines, revenue hungry EU nations get multi-billion dollar windfalls, and EU politicians get to look like defenders of the people who will be tough on US companies. Everybody wins, except for would-be competitors and the consumers that don't get any choices about the services they use.

Raphmedia 8y ago

Or nobody online is ever able to do this, online video streaming dies and TV keeps on living on artificial life support.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I'm wondering if this is overblown, in that while it is clear that rights clearance is an issue the technical solution is essentially moderating all posts. And while that probably breaks the current YouTube business model, as I understand it from Alphabet's quarterly statements YouTube isn't even breaking even today. I get that it would massively reduce the 'new content stream' but for their commercial clients things wouldn't change all that much. It would also eliminate unlawful video completely since everything would be pre-screened.

missjellyfish 8y ago
That reminds me of Orwell.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  How so? That content is screened for copyright infringement?

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

What are they supposed to be affording that's actually required in the Directive, like explicitly. Does it say "content must be scanned" or is it more "carriers must ensure content is licensed". If it's the later what's to stop them just adding a "is this licensed" tick box [aka check-box] to the upload form; which IIRC YouTube already have? They, YouTube, keep mentioning science videos and such but I can't work out what they mean, why would that be any more blocked than cat videos, or videos of people falling over, or whatever else YouTube is hosting -- is quality content somehow more at risk or is that just YouTube's attempt to spin/market their opposition?

kllrnohj 8y ago
The issue is that YouTube, or any other video host, becomes liable for copyright violations of their users. They lose the safe harbor of just being a middle man and must actively prevent unlicensed redistributions. This means you not only need a ContentID system in the first place, you also need to be ready to handle the financial & legal consequences of inevitably not being perfect.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Ah OK, it was written as if it was a primarily technological cost to perform the "filtering" that was prohibitive. They mean then they can't afford the system if their anticipated penalties are imposed && if they fail to catch unlicensed works && are subsequently sued successfully for large amounts && can't recover those costs from the uploader. How many microseconds would it be after such a regulation passed that media mega corps would pull the trigger and kill the goose-that-laid-the-golden-eggs. >you not only need a ContentID system // How does the Directive specify that, I'm afraid I haven't read it yet.
  - bskap 8y ago
    > In the absence of the authorisation referred to in the second subparagraph of paragraph 1, Member States shall provide that an online content sharing service provider shall not be liable for acts of communication to the public or making available to the public within the meaning of this Article when: > (a) it demonstrates that it has made best efforts to prevent the availability of specific works or other subject matter by implementing effective and proportionate measures, in accordance with paragraph 5, to prevent the availability on its services of the specific works or other subject matter identified by rightholders and for which the rightholders have provided the service with relevant and necessary information for the application of these measures; So basically if the rightsholders can convince the courts that they could have done more to proactively prevent copyright infringement, they're liable.

tannhaeuser 8y ago

A monopoly is what we have right now.

surak 8y ago

That IPR is an interesting blockchain/DLT use case is well known, what is perhaps not that well known is that Google does not like permissionless blockchain solutions as it would disrupt their conceptually centralized platform model. A few years ago there was a start-up planning such a solution for handling IPR related to music, but the copyrights holders or rather their national governance agencies did not want to enlist their IPR through this system, possibly because a transparent automatic system would have replaced these governing bodies and their armies of lawyers. Hopefully the @European Commission will fund a standardization effort regarding IPR and a permissionless blockchain solution to solve the issue described in the article. The worst case scenario is that Google pushes its own ContentID solution on everyone and charges a percentage to perform the billing. This is a much larger issue than what is presented by the CEO.

dools 8y ago

No, any regulated financial impact occurs across the board and is not anti-competitive. Regulation is good, lobbying is bad, libertarianism will destroy us all.